The mingw installation via ppm took about 3 minutes on the machine I'm using at the moment.

A few comments about ppm:
- First, yes it can take awhile for the gui to start and you do get the "hourglass phenomenon". During this time, it is re-syncing with the repositories that you have active. That means (a)if you've recently used it, it is a lot faster because your local info is more up to date, (b) the fewer repositories you have active, the less syncing it will have to do. For default I just leave the main AS one active and if I can't find what I want there, then I add more repositories as the hunt widens..

- If the GUI offends you, then why use it? The command line I/F didn't go away. open an command window and type "ppm help" and you'll see what to do.

Oh, an unrelated but perhaps nice point for you to know...the new version of PDK can do all of the "final polishing" of the .exe (embed your company's icon and put in the build version info, product name, etc) without having to fiddle with running another utility. It will have all the normal windows stuff.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other